17 Wylde Street is an icon in Potts Point and known for its chic style.

Unit 23, 17 Wylde Street is for sale through Jason Boon and Geoff Cox at Richardson and Wrench: https://www.rwebay.com.au/4877794/

Aaron Bolot (1900-1989), its award-winning architect, designed this building, completed in 1950/51 to look outwards. Its radiating floor plan, curved glass façade and north-east facing aspect reflect this environmental approach.

Apartments have huge leafy panoramas. All have an abundance of natural light facing north for winter warmth and are naturally ventilated. The former balcony/sunroom is accessed from various rooms. Kitchens were designed to minimise walking and originally featured a rarity for their time, a cream telephone. Even the carpet was originally, specially designed. Window frames are steel to reduce maintenance.  Apartments are paired and serviced by only one of two lift cores giving the effect of a private entrance. The service cores and kitchen and bathroom are at the rear overlooking the rear court. The garage features a clever turntable, still extant, to ensure cars left front first.

Unit 23 enjoys French-style, chevron-shaped parquet flooring.

Bolot pre-empted the apartment boom of the1960s during which over 50% of new dwellings were apartments. He set the style bar high for apartment living.

He also designed projects with Walter Burley Griffin, designer of Canberra.

During this period Art Deco design was fashionable, especially with cinemas, which promoted the ‘Hollywood’ aesthetic. Bolot designed the Ritz theatres in Randwick and Goulburn, the Brisbane Regent and Melbourne’s Liberty Theatre, one of the first in Australia to have a “gold fibre” screen suitable for 3-D pictures, a novelty.  Moving to Sydney in 1930 he designed the Gosford Regal Theatre. It featured the avant-garde, streamlined Moderne Style using curves and included a “crying room” to which patrons could retire during emotional scenes.

In 1938 he designed Ashdown, a curved apartment block at 96-98 Elizabeth Bay Road and in 1966 he designed Woollahra’s Jewish Neuweg Synagogue of which he was a member.

Number 17 was completely unique for its time. It had no building name: its number alone sufficed for its identity which was frosted into the entrance doors using its own, unique design font.

It was not a company title but a Community Cooperative title, an early form of strata, which enabled owners to have a stronger say in its management but aided banks to lend money to owner-occupiers.

Until 1945 it was illegal for building societies to lend money to strata buildings. Previously, such funding for ownership was restricted to company title buildings.

Bolot thus democratised ownership.

And he changed the way people purchased and lived in enjoyed their homes.

By Andrew Woodhouse

Heritage Solutions